University of Notre Dame
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1985
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  131
    The Possibility of Inductive Moral Arguments
    Philosophical Papers 35 (2): 231-246. 2006.
    Is it possible to have moral knowledge? ‘Moral justification skeptics’ hold it is not, because moral beliefs cannot have the sort of epistemic justification necessary for knowledge. This skeptical stance can be summed up in a single, neat argument, which includes the premise that ‘Inductive arguments from non-moral premises to moral conclusions are not possible.’ Other premises in the argument may rejected, but only at some cost. It would be noteworthy, therefore, if ‘inductive inferentialis…Read more
  •  121
    Telling it like it is: Philosophy as Descriptive Manifestation
    American Philosophical Quarterly 42 (3): 2005. 2005.
    What do Ross’s The Right and the Good; Chisholm’s Theory of Knowledge; Kripke’s Naming and Necessity; and Audi’s The Architecture of Reason have in common? They all advance important philosophical positions, but not so much via analytic arguments as via formal schemas, distinctions, examples, and analogies. They use such formal schemas, etc, to describe the world so as to make some aspect of it manifest. That is, they simply try to ‘tell it like it is’. This ‘method of descriptive manifestat…Read more
  •  148
    Promises and Material Conditionals
    Teaching Philosophy 16 (2): 155-156. 1993.
    Some beginning logic students find it hard to understand why a material conditional is true when its antecedent is false. I draw an analogy between conditional statements and conditional promises (especially between true conditional statements and unbroken conditional promises) that makes this point of logic less counter-intuitive.